Update: I was unfortunately not aware of Shamus Young's severe criticism of Fallout 3 available here to link in the original piece and I regret that. It dovetails rather nicely with what I've written and it's much better executed than my piece. I strongly recommend anyone...

GAMING NEWS

Tony Hawk HD Dev Responds To Reviews

Part of what made me so disappointed with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD was that I was told one thing... and was delivered something else. When you say you're going to recreate the original games, I assume it means you're going to be as faithful as possible to the original games.

Instead, it felt more like Robomodo was more faithful to their sponsors and their corporate owners. Responding to harsh critics like me, Robomodo CEO Josh Tsui told Gamasutra:

A few [reviewers] were quite vicious.

The tricky thing about this game specifically is that it plays to childhood or teen memories and those memories can be very subjective obviously. We kept the mechanics the same even though they were 13-years-old because that was our number one priority.

Except you added the manual to THPS 1 levels and left the game half as tight as Neversoft originally made it. I would argue that those are objective differences to my teenage memories.

Had we changed it up and modernized it...

You did.

...we would have gotten the same criticism from the other side.

No, you would have gotten the same criticism because THAT'S WHAT YOU DID.

We knew going in that there were going to be some comments about the gameplay, but it's not Pro Skater 5, it's what Pro Skater 1 & 2 were.

No. There's just... so much you got wrong... in the game and in that sentence. Josh, I'm sorry if you felt my (or anyone else's) review was "vicious" but the fact is that our job is to criticize a game. Unfortunately, your game had a lot of issues to criticize. I certainly do hope you bring the skateboarding franchise back, but as it is, you're studio is ill-equipped to do so, what with an obvious lack of awareness as to what people loved about the original Tony Hawk games.